Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (5 page)

“Thank you.”

“Could you tell me what he died from?”

“He had had a stroke about a year ago and he’d been in ill health ever since.”

“Ill health or bad health?”

Both, it seemed. The guy was a diabetic with a heart condition. He weighed almost 500 pounds.

“I think my husband knew he was dying, because he asked me to go shopping. When I returned, he was dead.”

He didn’t want her to be there when death took his body.

“How long were you married?” Shanlian asked solicitously.

“Eleven years. We were together since I was fifteen.”

As the conversation wore on, she got friendlier. From the way she answered questions, she sounded like a people pleaser. Shanlian sensed that someplace down the line, back in her past, Giles had been abused. Psychologically, physically, it did not matter. It made you anxious to please another human being so you wouldn’t be abused further.

“Jessie, that’s my husband, he treated me badly,” she volunteered.

“Really?” said the cop sympathetically.

“Yeah. If one of his customers needed, you know, a favor, I was there for them.”

“You mean a sexual favor?” asked Shanlian with quiet, seemingly naive interest.

“Yes.”

She wasn’t a prostitute, but her husband had prostituted her.

“And what business was he in?” the detective asked, knowing the answer.

“Drugs,” she replied.

It was quite common for drug dealers to offer their girlfriends to regular buyers. The girlfriends agreed. It was a business arrangement. Sex occasionally with clients, in return for being taken care of—cars, money, whatever they wanted.

Carol Giles, Shanlian felt, was the kind of woman who would tell a man what he wanted to hear. She may not have been a prostitute but in that sense, she acted like one.

“How long were you dating Tim Collier?” the detective wondered.

“Several months,” she replied.

“Carol, would you pass a lie detector test if you were asked if Tim Collier had murdered Nancy Billiter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you scared of Collier?”

“Yes, yes,” Carol said, practically jumping to answer that question.

“Why?”

“Timmy told me that he had done seven people, seven murders, while he was involved with a gang in Sacramento, California.”

“What can you tell me about those homicides?”

“I can’t remember. When me and Timmy were in Port Huron recently, he wanted to get a seven-man tattoo to represent the killings.”

“What about sex? Between Nancy and Collier?”

“Nah, I don’t think they were involved together.”

Shanlian remembered the burn marks on Billiter’s body and the bong on the coffee table in Giles’s house.

“Has Tim Collier ever burned you with a bong?”

Carol had been looking down at the table. After the question was asked, she looked up and began to cry.

“Tim used to use acid to do that,” she blurted out. “It’s still in my car at my house. The acid is. And,” she sobbed, “Nancy and Tim, they had been smoking crack in the basement on Wednesday night.”

She looked over at Shanlian.

“Yes?”

“And they were talking about the burglary. See, I didn’t believe Nancy that a burglary had occurred, because I found my daughter’s coin bank in the car I’d loaned to Nancy.”

In Carol’s mind, that meant that it was Nancy who had stolen the VCR and other stuff and she had made up some cock-and-bull story about a burglar.

“What happened after Tim and Nancy smoked crack? What time was that?”

“About eleven-thirty. Then about one-thirty, I went upstairs to check on my children, who were sleeping. When I got back to the basement, Nancy was on the bed, tied up with nylons, and she was screaming.”

Shanlian knew that would explain the ligature marks he’d noticed on her wrists.
Now we’re getting down to it
, Shanlian thought.

“What happened then?”

“Nancy’s pants leg was off.”

Shanlian remembered that from the scene.

“And Tim was beating her with a .45,” Carol continued.

That explained the beating and bruise marks.

“I was scared because Tim pointed the gun at me, so I went upstairs.”

Now that was strange. If a guy pointed a gun at Shanlian, he’d freeze. Guy points a gun at Carol Giles and she responds by saying, “Excuse me, gotta go,” and leaving the room. That just didn’t make sense, unless she had more guts than any man or woman alive.

“I smoked two cigarettes upstairs and then Tim came up, and after that, I didn’t hear Nancy screaming anymore. Could I use the bathroom?”

“Sure.”

Shanlian got up and opened the door. He asked one of the detectives to show her to the ladies’ room.

“Stand outside while she does her business,” Shanlian advised.

With Carol gone, and his concentration momentarily broken, Shanlian was able to note how hot the interview room had gotten. Two bodies were in the overheated air and both reeked of sweat, one of fear. Shanlian stepped out into the corridor and ran into one of the local detectives. “I got her to open up,” he said.

“We know,” replied the cop.

“What?”

Shanlian was more than surprised; he was shocked. How the hell did they know what was happening inside the room? There wasn’t even a two-way mirror.

Turned out there was a microphone hidden in the room. The local cops had been listening all along. They heard every single word.

For a minute, Shanlian felt violated. How dare they listen in without him knowing? Then he calmed down and realized it didn’t make any difference. After all, he had gotten her to open up.

Shanlian was convinced Carol Giles knew more than she was willing to tell. She had too many details of the crime down pat for someone who was just on the scene. If she wasn’t a participant, then she definitely helped dump the body.

But what to do with her now? They didn’t have enough to charge her, and if they released her, they knew they would be SOL—shit out of luck. Giles could easily take a powder.

Ever since Officer Tom Helton had been promoted out of uniformed patrol and into the detective bureau a few months before, his life had gotten a lot more interesting.

Fender benders and domestic disturbances were now a thing of the past. He’d done that and the usual patrol stuff for eighteen years in uniform. Then when a position in the detective bureau opened up, he applied for it and was accepted.

Helton looked like the actor Ned Beatty had in his youth, but even more affable. He was intelligent and dedicated, and he loved his new job. It gave him a chance to investigate crimes in depth, crimes like robbery, credit card fraud and burglaries, which were common in the township.

As for murder, this wasn’t a big-city police department. Sure, the chief was a retired bigwig from Detroit, but that’s about as close as they got to a connection with big-city homicide.

In the eighteen years Helton had been on the force, Bloomfield averaged maybe one murder a year, and there were years when no one was murdered in the confines of the township. It was a nice, safe, secure place to live.

Like most of his friends at work, Helton couldn’t afford to live in the township. He lived in the next township over, in a plain A-frame house with his wife, Doris, and their two kids, eight-year-old Al and twelve-year-old Marie.

That Friday night, he was the on-call detective. That meant that if a crime occurred after 5:00
P.M.
and before 8:00
A.M.
, he would be called in to investigate. More often than not, things were quiet and the on-call got a good night’s sleep.

Tom and his family had had dinner together. Afterward, he puttered around the house, reading a magazine, playing with the kids; then at ten o’clock, he turned on his favorite Friday night TV show,
Homicide
. After watching the local news and a little bit of
Nightline
, he turned in around 11:45
P.M.
Five minutes later, the phone rang. He sighed, the way someone sighs when they know they’re about to get bad news.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Dispatcher Johnson at the station,” said a female voice. “This Officer Helton?”

“Yup.”

“Would you come in? We have a homicide. It looks like two women and a guy were partying and doing crack, some type of argument broke out and one of the women was killed.”

“I’ll be right there.”

As he got out of bed, Doris said, “You ought to get a regular job like I have.” Helton laughed, because his wife was more used to the crazy hours than he was—she ran the state’s crime lab and was frequently called out to crime scenes at all hours.

Still safely ensconced under the covers, Doris asked what was up. Helton quickly explained while changing into jeans and a T-shirt. He kissed Doris good-bye. He padded quietly out and down the darkened stairs to the garage, where he started up his 1996 Ford Taurus. He pressed the gray button on the plastic case attached to the visor.

With a grinding of gears and pulleys, the garage door slowly opened and Helton pulled out into the night to help work a case that, at least according to the dispatcher, sounded like a pretty simple murder. Ten minutes later, he got to headquarters and pulled around back to the parking lot reserved for uniformed and plain-clothes officers. The one out front was primarily for visitors.

“Carol Giles basically claims she was a witness to the murder of Nancy Billiter,” Lieutenant Sheridan explained when Helton arrived at headquarters.

“Who’d she say did it?” asked Helton.

“Her boyfriend, Tim Collier,” said Shanlian, who introduced himself and quickly sketched in the case’s Genesee County background.

“She told us of some places Collier stays in when he’s in Flint,” Shanlian continued.

Helton knew Flint to be a real low-life city. He knew about the GM pullout and how the locals had suffered. Not surprisingly, especially to sociologists and cops, crime skyrocketed as the employment rate plummeted.

“We think he might be in Flint, and we’ve got my police department staking out his haunts.

“I’ve requested a search warrant for the Giles house and the crime lab to get down here to process it,” added Sheridan.

That all made sense. The Giles house was now considered to be a crime scene.

“Here.” Shanlian handed over five documents. Helton looked through the pile.

There was a consent to search form signed by Giles for the home at Walnut Lake Road; a copy of the Genesee County Medical Control Authority ambulance run #199493 (the cargo was Nancy Billiter’s body); a time card and employee fact sheet for Nancy Billiter from her employer, South Boulevard Station in Auburn Hills; and two pages from a phone bill in the name of “Phyllis Burke,” mother of the victim, showing eighteen phone calls to the West Bloomfield residence of Carol Giles.

Helton tagged them and placed them into evidence. While the material could not be contaminated, like forensics, it was possible for a defense lawyer to contend later that the chain of custody was somehow broken. It was therefore best to log evidence ASAP.

“Also Kate McNamara is coming down,” said Sheridan.

McNamara was the on-call prosecutor for the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office. The on-call’s job was to make sure the cops did everything by the book so nothing would get thrown out in court and to offer whatever assistance was necessary and appropriate. Helton knew McNamara to be a real nice lady.

Sheridan explained that they had already put out an APB on Collier, who was driving a gold-colored Caddy. Two cars, one marked, the other plain, had been sent to stake out the Giles house in case Collier came back. The department’s unmarked car was a Ford Expedition without top lights, but there were strobes inside that could be employed in an emergency.

“Sounds like we got it pretty well covered,” said Helton. “Maybe I should look in on her.”

“She’s writing out her statement now,” said Shanlian.

Helton stuck his head in the interview room and saw Carol laboring fiercely over a yellow foolscap pad.

“Want a Coke?” he asked her with a smile.

“No thanks,” she answered, head up for a second, then back down to her writing.

Helton quickly closed the door.

“So what do we do with her now?” Shanlian asked.

The three men quickly reviewed what they had so far and agreed they didn’t have enough to charge her. But like Shanlian said, they’d be SOL if they let her go.

“She says she was abused, right?” Helton asked.

Shanlian nodded.

“There’s a battered woman’s shelter nearby. It’s called Haven. We can put her there overnight for safekeeping.”

It was agreed to do just that. Back in the interview room, Kevin Shanlian told Carol Giles what her accommodations would be for the night, emphasizing how she would be safe there, away from Timmy and anyone else who would want to do her harm.

“Oh, thanks,” said Carol, sounding relieved.

She handed over her written statement. Outside, Shanlian examined it.

“Nancy was moaning and Tim hit her in the head with the gun,” Carol had written. “It looked like Tim had killed her. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. I looked away from Nancy. Tim had the gun. I didn’t want him to shoot me. Who would take care of Jesseca and L’il Man?”

Throughout it all, the basement TV had been on. Carol sat down on the floor next to it. She looked at the moving images on the screen and realized she hadn’t been paying any attention to it, but there was something about its comforting presence, so she kept it on. She smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, trying to think about what she should do.

“If I call the police, he’ll know I was on the phone and kill me before they got here. If I just made sure the kids didn’t wake up and get out of bed, they’ll be all right,” she wrote.

As these thoughts were flooding through her mind, Tim came downstairs and turned off the TV and all the lights, except the light in the backyard and out at the garage.

“I know she did it. I know she did it,” he kept saying. ‘Bitch can’t lie good. Everything’s going to be all right. I’ll take care of you and the kids. Everything’s going to be fine.’